As a kid, one of my favourite moments in The Empire Strikes Back was when Han Solo and Chewbacca got the drop on an Imperial probe droid on Hoth by flanking it on either side and blasting it to bits, so you can imagine I was pretty stoked when Star Wars Zero Company allowed me to pull off plenty of ice cold combat manoeuvres just like it during the first 10 hours of its campaign. When it was first revealed last year I assumed this turn-based tactics adventure would only appeal to hardcore fans of the genre, that it was merely XCOM with X-Wings, perhaps. However, after getting hands-on with a near-finished build, I’m happy to report that Zero Company’s strategic shooting seems extremely approachable for newcomers without sacrificing any of the complexity that more experienced fans might expect. It’s a bit like a Sarlacc pit: very easy to drop into, but you might be surprised at just how deep it gets.
[Zero Company is] a bit like a Sarlacc pit: very easy to drop into, but you might be surprised at just how deep it gets.“
Before I could get stuck into its enjoyable blaster-based battles, though, I had to first create my character. In Zero Company you play primarily as Hawks, a former captain of the Grand Army of the Republic who’s charged with leading a special forces group dubbed Zero Company and investigating a mysterious new paramilitary cult known as the Infinite Coil. You don’t get to choose Hawks’ backstory, but you do get to design their look by paging through a healthy variety of species, facial features, combat specialisations, and clothing options. I had no regrets about the bright purple Twi’lek I created to be my Hawks, but it was nice to know that even if I did grow tired of her floppy head-tails, I had the option to completely switch up her species and overall appearance in between missions by returning to the customisation station in her home base.
Company of Zeroes
To be clear, I’m coming to Zero Company as a lifelong Star Wars fan, not as someone with any real expertise with the turn-based tactics genre at large. However, I was pleased to find that Zero Company’s fighting is extremely simple to pick up thanks to an intuitive control setup and a gentle early tutorial phase, yet it gradually becomes flexible enough to allow for some really creative battle strategies. During the player’s turn, each character gets three action points that you can use to reposition them within a set radius, trigger an attack on an enemy, or manually set up an overwatch cone to automatically target foes that may be on the move once your turn has ended. Additionally, your squad also gets a shared pool of advantage points earned for each successful attack you land on the enemy, and they can be spent to unleash unique character abilities like firing a devastating rocket launcher round or a barrage of sweeping blaster shots to both damage and disorientate an opponent.
Star Wars Zero Company Preview Screens
Zero Company’s scraps are more like star skirmishes than full-blown Star Wars, but that doesn’t mean things don’t still get pretty hairy at times. Along the way, your squad of soldiers grows to include everything from medics to marksmen to astromech droids, and getting the team make-up just right is critical in order to keep your success rate high, especially if you opt to play on one of the more challenging of Zero Company’s four difficulty settings. For the most part, I settled on making my Hawks an all-round gunslinger and brought along with me the burly Kabb Uppercut to deliver his namesake boxing blows in close quarters melee situations, former clone trooper Trick to provide cover at range, and a support droid to lob equippable utility items like impact bombs to shatter bands of B1 Battle Droids into sparking shards of scrap. However, during my hands-on time I also got to recruit everyone from jetpack-jumping Mandalorians to junior Jedi, and had a great time mixing and matching my squad members as my small army expanded.
Zero Company’s scraps are more like star skirmishes than full-blown Star Wars, but that doesn’t mean things don’t still get pretty hairy at times. “
Zero Company’s absorbing combat system benefits further from some handy extra features like the option to call for backup, which orders one of your squadmates to automatically follow up your attack with one of their own to really pile on the punishment. I soon settled into a good rhythm of thinning basic ground troops, but just as I was getting comfortable with my stress-tested strategies, Zero Company started introducing interesting new combatants to contend with that forced me to make adjustments to my approach. I quickly found that there’s no point targeting Droidekas with standard attacks, for example, since their blue shields deflect even your most well-aimed blaster bolts. Instead, I discovered the best way to topple them was to try and trap them within an array of strategically placed overwatch cones, so that I’d automatically catch them with their shields down while they were rolling to reposition themselves in between turns.
The highlight of my Zero Company hands-on, however, was a multi-part mission featuring a familiar sand-hating special guest operator. After a prisoner exchange goes wrong in the cloud city of Bespin, my Hawks found herself paired up with none other than Anakin Skywalker and an unknown stranger packing some serious sharpshooter skills. What ensued was a series of three different combat clashes, each with wildly contrasting objectives.
In the first I just needed to survive waves of incoming enemies smashing through the windows, in the second I was challenged with rescuing a half-dozen innocent civilians before they could get caught in the crossfire, while in the third I was tasked with defusing a series of explosives while dodging attacks from an enemy dropship that gives you one turn’s notice before it rains down hell and instantly injures any operators caught in its glowing red strike zones. This entire stretch made for the most intensely challenging and cinematic sequence in my whole hands-on, and the fact that its climax was set against the ticking clock of time bombs placed all the more pressure on my smart decision-making.
As you may expect, Anakin is an absolute beast on the battlefield, and I delighted in lining up groups of gun-toting goons and cutting them all down with one spinning hurl of his saber. As the battle transitioned onto an open-air rooftop area, I had a great time Force-pushing Infinite Coil commandos cowering behind cover right off the edge and watching them plummet down through the clouds to their doom. Of course, although he may be a marauding mass of Midichlorians, Anakin is still very much vulnerable to enemy attacks if you mismanage him. Indeed there were occasions where I got a bit too careless and left him in harm’s way at the end of a turn, exposing him to a one-shotting salvo from the gunship in the skies above. Zero Company may occasionally present you with some pretty powerful allies to play with, but that doesn’t mean its strict focus on the use of smart tactics ever wavers. Like a certain scruffy-looking smuggler once said, it’s probably best that you don’t get cocky.
Zero Chill
In between missions you make a hyperspeed jump back to your home base, a decommissioned cargo freighter known as the Den. Here you can shop for new weapon mods like stabilisers to improve your accuracy, recruit new operators for your squad, invest the credits you earn from battles into base upgrades like access to the black market or a droid repair station, or check-in with the other members of your team to share war stories or even just a tension-easing joke. Chatting to the various members of your gang isn’t just good for getting to know them; it can also present optional leads that can be pursued by accessing the Den’s holotable.
This galactic map can be used for two main purposes. For starters, it’s where you choose your next mission from, and beyond the somewhat linear path of the story’s opening hours you soon get your pick from a variety of mission types at any one time, whether you want to undertake a daring rescue mission or perhaps a safecracking heist instead. These incursions give you direct control of your troops on the ground in a number of different planetside locations from Lothal to Dantooine, and serve as the real meat of Zero Company’s campaign.
Additionally, the holotable is also where you decide which special operations you want to pursue. These are effectively hands-off tasks that often involve deciding on which combination of your operators you want to dispatch for a particular job, such as providing a security detail or boarding a derelict spaceship in order to search for salvage. Your team’s success in these jobs, and the rewards you earn in terms of credits and influence, often depends greatly on the individual bonds between each of the squad members you choose to delegate to. In fact, these bonds are constantly ebbing and flowing from one battle to the next, and as you strengthen them you can unlock a number of stat boosts for your teammates like health buffs and critical damage boosts, which prove to be crucial as later combat encounters gradually ramp up the challenge. Certainly Zero Company seems stuffed with careful choices to make, whether you’re on the battlefield or back at your base.
Zero Tolerance
Zero Company doesn’t just have plenty of depth, it also has plenty of death if you’re not careful. As in, permadeath. While each of your squadmates can be revived a couple of times during a battle – and you can bring them back to full fitness in between missions if you invest your credits in a medbay for the Den – should they fall for a third time within the same fight then they’re gone for good. And no, this isn’t some sort of temporary fake-out like Chewie seemingly exploding in an electrified transport ship before reappearing seconds later with a weary moan in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. If you lose a pal in Zero Company you have zero chance of ever seeing them again, which means there’s a serious incentive to not only win each fight but to keep your whole squad standing at its end.
Having such high stakes for each and every one of my heroes in Zero Company made me feel far more invested in their fates, especially as many of these support characters seem genuinely likeable, largely thanks to the strong performances from the voice cast. I was fairly non-plussed when the somewhat witless Rodian in my party perished within the campaign’s first few missions, but when my blue-skinned bestie Kabb Uppercut came home in a body bag after an assault on a smuggler’s den that went pear-shaped, I must admit that I felt pretty heartbroken. Permadeath can be toggled off if you’d prefer, but personally I plan on leaving it on when I tackle the finished game because it’s a novelty to play through a Star Wars story packed with so much peril. It’s one that feels like it was scripted by George RR Martin as opposed to George Lucas.
That is, assuming that the team at developer Bit Reactor can sand off Zero Company’s noticeable rough edges with some last minute patching in the coming weeks ahead of launch. Some of these issues were pretty minor, like broken camera angles and a framerate that occasionally coughs and splutters harder than General Grievous in some of the more graphically dense levels. Others were more annoying, like the times I was unable to target the enemy standing right beside me in a firefight or move the aiming reticule to the upper levels of an arena. Even when I could target an enemy and had a high percentage chance of hitting them, it was quite shocking how often my character’s aim would be worse than Greedo’s that time he shot first. But the most egregious errors were the handful of occasions that one of my operators was shot right through solid cover. I’m fine to run the risk of my favourite characters potentially dying at any given moment, but I want them to perish as a result of my tactical deficiencies rather than Zero Company’s technical ones.
However, bugs aside, I’ve very much enjoyed my time with Zero Company so far, especially as someone who’s relatively new to the tactics genre. Its story missions steadily ramp up in scale and intensity and introduce interesting new objectives and enemy types, its ever-expanding cast of operators is charismatic enough to make you care, and there’s considerable depth to its character customisation, bonding, and skill trees, which I’m keen to tinker with further in order to find the most consistent balance for my fireteam. If Bit Reactor manages get this thing fully operational, then Star Wars Zero Company could well be a turn-based tactics game to die for when it launches on August 27 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Tristan Ogilvie is a senior video editor at IGN’s Sydney office. He’s been ordering Star Wars characters around a battlefield since they were Kenner action figures on his living room carpet. Follow him on Blue Sky at @tristanogilvie.bsky.social